Monday, October 28, 2013

One of the best things about HSA is that hardware makers will be able to add Fixed Function Accelerators to the SoC for better performance of special tasks without putting too much work on the CPU & GPU.

One thing that could really need a boost is AI (Artificial Intelligence ) but by the looks of things we might finally get something that hardcore gamers have been wanting for years, better AI thinks to AI Co-Processors.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Notice that Sony is yet to show off it's new chip? very un Sony like because we all know that Sony love to show off it's technology.

The answer is AMD hasn't showed off it's new HSA APU Kaveri yet & the PS4 APU share a lot of the common features of Kaveri APU & will show off the Heterogeneous System Architecture before AMD unveil the HSA APU at the Developer Summit APU13 on November 11th.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Thuway of Neogaf has just released this information on Neogaf he is a known insider just in case you didn't know this already, I have been sitting on this info for about 3 months now but was asked not to say anything about it so I just kept it to myself.

Monday, October 21, 2013

SharpDX is an open-source project delivering the full DirectX API under the .Net platform, allowing the development of high performance game, 2D and 3D graphics rendering as well as realtime sound application.

SharpDX is built with a custom tool called SharpGen able to generate automatically a .NET API directly from the DirectX SDKheaders, thus allowing a tight mapping with the native API while taking advantages of the great strength of the .Net ecosystem.

SharpDX is fully supporting all Windows platforms including latest Windows 8 Metro and Windows Phone 8. Easily develop multimedia applications for desktop, WinRT and Windows Phone with the same API!

SharpDX needs your vote for .NET on Xbox One!

July 26, 2013

Yesterday was announced that Xbox One will allow indie developers to easily publish games on Xbox One.

We have still very few details about the indie developer program on this platform, but in order to use SharpDX and have full DirectX access on this platform, we need to ensure that .NET will be accessible on this platform.

If you would like to be able to develop cross-platform games with .NET on all Windows Platforms including the Xbox One, please vote for this user voice feature request:Allow .NET games on Xbox One

This will allow SharpDX to provide a compelling game development alternative on Xbox One!

" For the past 4 years, little by little the MonoGame team has grown. We've added various platforms and had lots of games released using MonoGame. Today is another major milestone.The MonoGame team is very proud to announce that a MonoGame port for PlayStation 4 is under-way.We are porting MonoGame to the PS4 using Xamarin's fully featured Mono for PS4 port (available through Sony's Console Developer Programme to approved developers).The MonoGame project and the whole team are ecstatic about the possibilities of bringing MonoGame to consoles.This port of MonoGame for PS4, is being spearheaded by Tom Spilman, from SickheadGames. Tom and Sickhead were responsible for the Windows 8 port of MonoGame.It is early days, but the initial work looks very promising. "

Fantastic PlayStation meeting!
Breaking Point - ALL your digital content from your PS3 WILL carry over on to your PS4!
@yosp
— GAME Basildon (@GAMEBasildon) October 18, 2013

Breaking News from Game this morning is that PS3 games will carry over to the PS4.

This news has a lot of people wondering how is this possible when the PS4 doesn't have The Cell Processor for Backwards Compatibility & the Jaguar CPU cores are so weak?

The answer that I have come up with is that the Vector Co- Processor that I have been hinting at from time to time that no one else is talking about is real & it's able to emulate the SPE's of the Cell Processor so playing PS3 games on the PS4 can be a reality.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Newly leaked slides from AMD's new Radeon R9 290X Hawaii GPU reveals that the Volcanic Islands GPU will also feature 8 Asynchronous Compute Engines much like the Liverpool GPU inside of Sony's new PS4.

Each of the 8 ACE's can manage up to 8 compute queues for a total of 64 compute commands, in comparison the HD 7970 only has 2 ACE's that could only queue 2 compute commands for a total of 4 & the Xbox One only has 2 ACE's but they also manage up to 8 compute queues for a total of 16 compute queues.

Could this mean that the PS4's GPU is also a part of AMD's Volcanic Islands family?

Below is a diagram of the PlayStation 4 Compute, Queues and Pipelines from VGleaks

From VGLeaks

"PS4 GPUhas a total of 2 rings and 64 queues on 10 pipelines

- Graphics (GFX) ring and pipeline

Same as R10xx

Graphics and compute

For game

- High Priority Graphics (HP3D) ring and pipeline

New for Liverpool

Same as GFX pipeline except no compute capabilities

For exclusive use by VShell

- 8 Compute-only pipelines

Each pipeline has 8 queues of a total of 64

Replaces the 2 compute-only queues and pipelines on R10XX

Can be used by both game and VShell (likely assign on a pipeline basis, 1 for VShell, and 7 for game)

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

You all might remember a interview with Sony's CTO last year where he talked about the future of PlayStation & he described the PS4 Chip as being a chip with most of the processing still being done by the CPU & GPU but also being helped out by DSP's & Programmable Logic

Fast forward to today & we have a SoC pictured in AMD's Next Generation APU (Kaveri ) & HSA presentation.

This SoC shown in the documents fit the description having a DSP & 'Fixed Function Accelerator' which could be the Vector Processor\ Compute Modular that some people have reported to have seen but we haven't heard much about it.

"However, there's a fair amount of "secret sauce" in Orbis and we can disclose details on one of the more interesting additions. Paired up with the eight AMD cores, we find a bespoke GPU-like "Compute" module, designed to ease the burden on certain operations - physics calculations are a good example of traditional CPU work that are often hived off to GPU cores. We're assured that this is bespoke hardware that is not a part of the main graphics pipeline but we remain rather mystified by its standalone inclusion, bearing in mind Compute functions could be run off the main graphics cores and that devs could have the option to utilise that power for additional graphical grunt, if they so chose."

-It's not stock x86; there are eight very wide vector engines and some other changes. It's not going to be completely trivial to retarget to it, but it should shut up the morons who were hyperventilating at "OMG! 1.6 JIGGAHURTZ!".

-The memory structure is unified, but weird; it's not like the GPU can just grab arbitrary memory like some people were thinking (rather, it can, but it's slow). They're incorporating another type of shader that can basically read from a ring buffer (supplied in a streaming fashion by the CPU) and write to an output buffer. I don't have all the details, but it seems interesting.

-As near as I'm aware, there's no OpenGL or GLES support on it at all; it's a lower-level library at present. I expect (no proof) this will change because I expect that they'll be trying to make a play for indie games, much as I'm pretty sure Microsoft will be, and trying to get indie developers to go turbo-nerd on low-level GPU programming does not strike me as a winner.

A truly innovative feature - the Playstation 4's world-famous vector co-processor. It's connected to a CPU core. It doesn't look like much on paper:

100 million transistors

300 mhz

$25 to produce

25 nm production process

16-way SIMD floating-point multiply-add instructions (512-bit)

1024-bit load-store instructions

512 Kbytes local memory

L2 cache of the X86 CPU

Write-to-memory feature - bypassing the CPU

Has a connection to the instruction dispatch of a regular x86 Jaguar core

It doesn't look like much, except for the 16-way multiply-adder! Besides that though - it only costs $25.00. "How can $25.00 worth of CPU logic improve the graphics pipeline?" Thus - top-secret alien technology. The world-famous vector co-processor. With it - developers can pull off pretty amazing effects, in real-time. I've already seen:

Full-screen per-pixel lighting! Pretty amazing - I haven't seen any games do that.Extremely realistic fire effectsExtremely realistic ice simulationMassive degrees of normal/displacement mappingAnd this is just the start.

512 Kbytes L2 cache connected to the 7 SPUs via a Token-Ring bus - which they used to inter-communicate as well

200 GB/s EIB L2 cache bandwidth

3.2 ghz clockrate

230 million transistors

$400 million to develop, $100 to produce

4-way SIMD

Playstation 4 - Vector Co-Processor

Developed by AMD and me (just a joke)

Based on the X86 architecture

1, 512-bit floating point multiply-adder

1.6 ghz clock rate

512 Kbyte local buffer + the CPU core's main buffer

Connected to the bus directly via a bus-interface unit, and to a CPU core

About 300 million transistors

$0 to develop, $80 to produce

307.2 GB/s buffer to execution unit

16-way SIMD

8 X86-based cores, each with 128-bit FP unit, L2 cache, and shared local memory between pairs of CPUs and between all 8

Doesn't seem as powerful as Cell does it? In fact - it's way, way more powerful. I just found this an interesting comparison. This design is more powerful - as the CPUs do not require direct developer intervention to get them to perform, as opposed to Cell, which only worked if the developers specifically coded for it.

16-way SIMD makes it 4 times faster, per clock. I.e. to do 16 FP multiply-adds, it takes 8 cycles. 4 load-stores, followed by 4 multiply adds - the Cell. But for the Vector Co-Processor to do 16 FP mulitply-adds, it takes 1 cycles. The Out-of-Order, 512-bit load-stores load the data, while the Vector Co-Processor is performing the data. Thus - the Vector Co-Processor alone is equal to 8 SPUs.

The PS4 specter vector? I'm not a 100% sure what it is at this stage... I'm 45% leaning towards physics offloading or helping out within that department. The other 55% is screaming a modified component for helping PS3 games work within the G/Cloud environment.

Now for the crazy speculations that I'm pretty much making up my self from my own speculations

PS4 APU might have a powerful Vector Unit on board as it's 'Fixed Function Accelerator' there has been a few hints of a vector co-processor but nothing solid but so it's still just wild speculations & wishful thinking from me.